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Mental Disorders: The Facts Behind the Marketing Campaign

“There are no objective tests in psychiatry-no X-ray, laboratory, or exam finding that says definitively that someone does or does not have a mental disorder.” “It’s bull—. I mean, you just can’t define it.” — Allen Frances, Psychiatrist and former DSM-IV Task Force Chairman

“Virtually anyone at any given time can meet the criteria for bipolar disorder or ADHD. Anyone. And the problem is everyone diagnosed with even one of these ‘illnesses’ triggers the pill dispenser.” — Dr. Stefan Kruszewski, Psychiatrist

The fact is, The American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association and the National Institute of Mental Health admit that there are no medical tests to confirm mental disorders as a disease but do nothing to counter the false idea that these are biological/medical conditions when in fact, diagnosis is simply done by a checklist of behaviors. Even the Executive Director of the nation’s leading mental health agency, the National Institute of Mental Health admits, “Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure.” Read more here: Psychiatrists Admit Disorders Are Not Diseases

Yet 120 million people worldwide have been diagnosed with mental disorders and placed on psychiatric drugs as ‘treatment.’ And while people are led to believe a diagnosis of mental illness or having a mental disorder is based on medical evidence or tests that these disorders are legitimate medical conditions, the fact is they are simply based on checklists of behaviors. People are also convinced that the only solution for treating problems of emotion, mood or behavior for themselves or their child, is drug treatment. The purpose of the information presented on this page is to provide the public with information about psychiatric diagnosis, mental disorder tests, drug side effects and medical alternatives to drugs, so they can make informed, educated decisions.

1) There are no medical or scientific tests that can prove mental disorders are medical conditions. Psychiatric diagnosis is based solely on opinion. Unlike medical disease, where tests can verify the existence of a medical condition (cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc) psychiatric diagnosis are based solely on checklists of behaviors, not any medical tests…

2) Yes people experience depression, anxiety and sadness, children do act out and/or misbehave, and yes, some people can become irrational and/or psychotic. This doesn’t make them ‘diseased’ and there is no evidence of physical/medical abnormality for any psychiatric disorder whether its Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD), Bi-Polar Disorder, Depression, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or Schizophrenia. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t solutions for people experiencing difficulty, there are non harmful, medical alternatives. But they do not require a psychiatric “label” to treat them. There is no mental illness test that is scientifically/medically proven. This isn’t a matter of opinion, psychiatrists who are opposed to the labeling of behaviors as mental illness openly admit this, and even the American Psychiatric Association admits this in the fine print of their own manual of mental disorders…

3) Why safe effective medical treatments to mental difficulties are kept buried. The fact is, there are many medical conditions, that undetected and untreated, can appear as psychiatric ‘symptoms. There are non-harmful, non-drug solutions to treating problems of mood, attention, behavior that do not require a psychiatric diagnosis or psychiatric ‘treatment’ (drugs) but can be effectively treated with standard medical, not psychiatric, treatment…

4) The campaign to “Stop The Stigma of Mental Illness” is brought to you by…Big Pharma. You’ve probably seen the ads, to “Stop the Stigma” of mental illness but most likely weren’t informed that the industry sponsoring this campaign was the Pharmaceutical industry which makes $88 billion dollars a year on sales of psychiatric drugs…

5) What are psychiatric labels? Bi-Polar, Schizophrenia, ADHD, Social Anxiety Disorder, Depression—these are all psychiatric labels. People are being labeled based not on medical tests, but on psychiatric opinion. These labels are problematic for numerous reasons, the first of which is that these labels become part of their permanent medical record…

6) Psychiatric drugs are big business. The psychiatric pharmaceutical industry is making a killing—$84 Billion per year based on people being labeled with mental disorders that are not based on science or medicine, but on marketing campaigns…

7) Psychiatric drug side effects— there are 207 International Psychiatric Drug Regulatory Warnings, 221 Psychiatric Drug Studies and more than 470,000 adverse reactions to psychiatric drugs on file with the US FDA (the FDA estimates that less than 1% of all serious events are ever reported to it, so these numbers represent only a fraction of the side effects being experienced by patients/consumers). CCHR has compiled all international drug regulatory warnings & studies about psychiatric drug risks into an easy to search psychiatric drug database…